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A Call for Action from the Competitive Play Community

I wanted to talk about the state of competitive play in 40k. This topic has been something I have spoken about with many friends, and I felt it was time to sit down and put everything out there. The final straw to break the horse’s back in this case was Jervis Johnson’s article two weeks ago. The basic point of the article I took away was 40k as a rule set gives you many ways to play, so you can pick and choose how you play to better enjoy the hobby.

Now, from a narrative/fluff end of the spectrum, the current rules sets add a lot of flavor to the game. Forging the narrative has been GW’s priority with this edition, and it is safe to say, they have succeeded. I can think of several good examples of games that had a great story come out of them. They may not have been fair match-ups, but they did forge a narrative (even if the narrative was the tau shot everything).

I think we can all agree though that the rule set has a number of flaws in it. I won’t get into the specifics of it here (that is a debate for another day, and probably with wiser men than myself). I am sure we do not all agree on which rules are broken, which combos are busted, how a rule works, etc.

I think it is time that we as a community stop calling for GW to fix these issues. Yes, it would be nice if they did, but at this point we are banging our heads against a wall. So let’s stop asking them for a fix and start asking someone else to fix it. I purpose that the big tournament organizers of our hobby sit down and write a faq or errata for our current rule sets and codices.

I want to clarify; I am not asking all tournaments to play the same format. I am asking them to faq or errata everything the same way. They can keep their individual themes such as one tournament saying armies can be made from 2 sources while another says 3. Something like a 2+ re-rollable invuln save being nerfed to a 2+ then a 4+ could be something that they could all agree on though. I’ll give credit where credit is due, that came from Frontline Gaming, which happens to have a complete FAQ for the main rulebook and all codices.

If the competitive community could do something like this, then competitive players can actually get that balanced rule set they want. You can show up to a tournament and not wonder how a judge will decide upon a confusing rule. Overly powerful combos may be toned down.

And this doesn’t hurt anyone. Jervis even applauded the ETC for doing something similar in his article. So, GW doesn’t seem to have a problem with it (after all, they are a model company first). The narrative/fluffy/non-competitive players don’t lose the rule sets that add flavor to the game. And the competitive players would finally get the answers they have been seeking.